A Horror World Conversation with Ray Garton
By Steven E. Wedel

Although I’ve never met him in person, I’ve interviewed this month’s victim once or twice before, and it’s always fascinating to pick his brain. I’ll never forget reading my first Ray Garton novel, LIVE GIRLS. Ah, back in the days before vampires glittered …

Horror World: Ray, it’s great to have you back in my hot seat. Even better to see that you are back in mass market printing, a place you never should have been out of. I’ve got a ton of questions, so let’s get right into this with the basics. Tell me why you write horror fiction instead of romance or action adventure or something else.

Ray Garton: The truth is, I write all those things.  But I usually do it within the horror genre.  My novels almost always include a love story, there’s always plenty of action, lots of mystery and suspense.  More and more these days, I’m writing those things without the element of horror.  But the horror genre has been my home for a long time, and I feel very comfortable there.

I don’t think I made a choice to write horror, it’s just that when I wrote, that’s what came out of me.  Being afraid was something with which I was very familiar growing up.  My strange religious upbringing had me in fear all the time.  In fact, it’s only been in recent years that I’ve been able to shed that fear entirely.  Usually when someone asks me why I write horror, I say it’s because I was raised a Seventh-day Adventist, and that particular religious cult taught me how to write horror very well.

In the last several years, my attention has wandered away from horror to other areas.  Frankly, I’m kind of tired of fear.  It was a big and very unwelcome part of my life for a long time, and getting rid of it has helped me discover that I have other interests and can write just as well outside the genre.  I’ve begun to realize lately that I’m less interested in how people die and more interested in how they live.  But I will always return to the horror genre because my roots are still there, and they’re deep.

HW: Way back in the halcyon days of the 1980s you seemed to be near the top of the horror heap with books like LIVE GIRLS, DARKLINGS, and LOT LIZARDS. Then the bubble burst and you seemed to go underground. Talk to us a little about the changing market and how it affected your career.

RG: Actually, that was as much my own fault as the market’s.  I made one of those mistakes people often make when they’re young, cocky, and stupid, and it bit me in the ass.  When I wrote Crucifax, there was some dispute over a rather gruesome scene in the book.  My editor at Pocket refused to publish it as written.  It became a rather famous quibble at the time.  I went to my agent, Richard Curtis, and appealed to him for support, expecting him to back me up.  He took my editor’s side.  He said he thought the scene was an unnecessary gross-out and did nothing to further the story.  Of course, by then I was on my high horse and riding off into the sunset with the attitude that I was right, that I was being punished by a prudish editor.  Stupidly, I left Richard in the wake of this disagreement.  Very stupidly.

For years after that, I passed from one agent to another and had periods when I had no representation at all, and I went nowhere.  No one gave me the amount of support and encouragement I got from Richard, and no one believed in me the way he had.   During that time, the small press kept me going.  Rich Chizmar at Cemetery Dance and Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press – those guys will always be heroes of mine, and I will always be grateful to them.  They kept me on bookshelves.  They stuck with me through some bad times, put up with my crankiness and tantrums, and in the process, they produced some beautiful editions of my books.  I will always be very proud of those books.  They’re wonderful guys and they run great companies.  I published so many limited editions that I became surprisingly collectible.  I’m still amazed when I see the prices on some of those books.  It’s really touching that there are people out there who think enough of my work to pay some of the going prices for those limiteds.

Eventually, I came to see that both Richard and my editor were right about that scene in Crucifax, that I had been guilty of doing something for which I criticized other writers – going for the gross-out simply for the sake of the gross-out.  I went back to Richard on hands and knees, apologized for my youthful stupidity and asked if he’d take me back.  He did, and I’m still with him today.

Of course, the bottom falling out of the horror market didn’t help.  When I showed up, business was booming.  But that went away, of course. Things changed, and they’re still changing.  But the popularity of the genre didn’t die.  Horror fiction never dies, no matter what you may choose to call it.  What changes is the way publishing approaches it.

HW: You took on some interesting projects in the ‘90s, including GOOD BURGER and IN A DARK PLACE. I want to rehash some specifics of the latter in a second, but first, what was it like to do work-for-hire in general. Was it limiting? Easier?

RG:  I enjoyed it.  I know that some people don’t think it’s a very respectable way for a writer to make a living, but the way I see it, if a writer is making a living writing then screw what anyone thinks.  People often ask if  that work was limiting, but in fact, it was quite liberating.  When I was hired to write a novelization, I was free of a lot of the responsibility that comes with writing a book.  The story wasn’t mine, so if the story sucked, it wasn’t my responsibility.  My only job was to adapt that story into a book that was as entertaining as I could possibly make it, and that was a lot of fun to do.  In A Dark Place was the exception – that was a pain in the ass for a number of reasons.  But the novelizations and TV tie-ins were great fun.

HW: Alright, you told me in a previous interview, and it’s posted in various places on the Web, but with the release of the movie “A Haunting in Connecticut,” let’s get this out of the way one more time. Tell us about working with Ed and Lorraine Warren on IN A DARK PLACE.

RG:  It was … enlightening.  I was raised in a world in which the belief in demons and Satan were commonplace.  I was never entirely convinced, even as a kid, about any of that stuff, but I went along with it, straddled the fence for a long time, and because of the things I’d been taught from infancy onward, I could be frightened by stories of demonic activity more than, say, someone who had never believed.  The story told by the Snedekers and the Warrens was one that, in the world I’d come from, made perfect sense.  Demons tormenting a family?  Sure, happens all the time.  The devil is a busy guy.  By the time I took that job, I was in my late twenties, and I was no longer much of a believer at all.  But I went in thinking that I was going to write the story of a family who honestly believed they’d had some kind of supernatural experience.  That was fine with me.

What I encountered instead was rank fraud.  No one involved in that story believed what they were saying.  It was all a lie concocted for money and attention.  Ed and Lorraine Warren appeared at first to be very charming and sincere, like everyone’s favorite eccentric, amusing aunt and uncle.  But the more time I spent with them, the more I saw through the act – and it was all an act.  Ed, of course, has gone on to that great paranormal scam in the sky, but Lorraine is still performing, and their nephew John Zaffis has carried on the family business.

Ed and Lorraine used their religion as a weapon.  They claimed to be devout Catholics, and they were always talking about priests being involved in their investigations.  The truth is, the Catholic church wouldn’t go near the Warrens, and any priests who’ve participated in their nonsense have been of dubious background at best.  The church has had no involvement with the Warrens whatsoever.  Never has.  As for their religion – like I said, they used it as a weapon.  To this day, when Lorraine wants to smear someone who criticizes or questions her ridiculous mumbo jumbo, she says, “He’s an atheist!  How can you believe anything said by a person who doesn’t even believe in god?”  They were pious when that’s what they needed to be, but all of that disappeared when they were relaxed and being themselves.  Ed was an angry, unstable person who often became violent when their credibility was questioned or criticized.  He nearly beat up Joe Nickel backstage at The Sally Jessy Raphael Show when they were promoting In A Dark Place, and there’s video of one of his tantrums on YouTube captured in an episode of A Current Affair.  And when I was having trouble getting the Snedeker family to keep their stories straight, Ed made no effort to conceal his contempt for them or the fact that what they did was all a bunch of show business.  He told me that all of the people who came to them were crazy, and said I should use what I could, make the rest up, and make it scary because that’s why they hired me.

Because of my upbringing, that experience – as annoying and infuriating as it was – was actually quite profound.  It gave me an up-close look at the way that sort of thing works, at how that business is run – and it’s nothing more than a business, just like the religion the Warrens constantly used in an effort to legitimize it.  I began to see things very differently after that.  It was a learning experience, and it helped me grow up.

HW: In your opinion, was anything about the case your wrote about real?

RG:  No, nothing.  There was nothing real about the story they told.  I haven’t even been able to find any evidence that the Snedekers’ son actually had cancer.  I’m not saying he didn’t, only that I’ve found no reason to believe that he did, especially considering the total lack of credibility in everything else I was told.  For example, the Snedekers claim they didn’t find out the house they were living in was a former funeral home until after they’d moved in, as if that fact had been hidden from them.  That’s not true at all – the realtor openly described the history of the house in the ads.  They knew exactly what that house was.  When I was in Connecticut with the Snedekers, I stumbled onto the fact that Carmen was running an illegal interstate lottery scam.  She was very concerned that I would tell someone, or mention it in the book.  Since then, I’ve learned that the Snedekers had a very shady background prior to moving into that house – an illegal lottery operation was not exactly an uncommon activity in that family.  And now Carmen is trying to sell herself as some kind of psychic, or “sensitive.”  She has a website, offers herself for lectures and personal appearances.  She claims she’s always had this ability, but she certainly didn’t have it when I knew her.  And if she did, then why didn’t she know the house was infested with demons when they moved in?  Why didn’t she believe her son when, as she claims, he tried to tell her there was something wrong with the house?  Nothing about their story holds up, other residents of that neighborhood have debunked many details of the story and have been calling it a fraud from the beginning.  So, no – there was nothing real about that story.

HW: Do you believe in ghosts? Any reason why or why not?

RG:  No.  I’ve never seen one, I’ve never seen any evidence of ghosts, and there’s certainly no scientific proof that they exist.  When I say “scientific proof,” by the way, I’m talking about real science – empirical evidence.  I’m not talking about the nervous folks who drag their electronic toys through abandoned buildings and every few minutes jump and say, “What was that?  Did you hear something?  Did you feel that cold spot?”  That’s not science, that’s reality TV, and like all reality TV, it has nothing to do with reality.  I am astonished by the number of people who watch that crap and actually believe it!  They don’t even stop to question, don’t consider for a moment the possibility that it’s staged, that’s a put-on.  We are becoming less religious as a culture, but we are no less gullible.  H. L. Mencken was not only right when he said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” he should have been given some kind of Nobel Prize for making the observation.

HW: Personally, I’d say your book was a damn fine read. It was, by far, the best of those commissioned by the Warrens, and I think that’s borne out by the fact Hollywood finally picked it up. You certainly did “make it scary.” Did you see the film version of your book? What did you think of it? Or, what do you think of a movie being made from the story?

RG:  I’m glad you enjoyed the book, but Hollywood never picked it up.  The movie The Haunting in Connecticut was not adapted from the book I wrote.  Carmen Snedeker, who now goes by the name Carmen Reed, worked that deal out on her own.  Technically, the story belongs to the Snedekers.  I was not involved with the movie and received no money from that deal, and Lorraine Warren wasn’t involved, either.  I understand Lorraine was quite furious when she learned she’d been cut out of that deal.  I wasn’t surprised in the least.  That’s the kind of people the Snedekers are.

After In A Dark Place was published, I immediately began to talk about my experience with the Snedekers and the Warrens.  I knew sooner or later, someone was going to debunk the whole thing – I knew it wouldn’t be hard – and I didn’t want them pointing a finger at me when they shouted “Fraud!”  So I started talking almost immediately.  After awhile, Carmen did everything she could to distance herself and her family from the book.  She claimed it was inaccurate, that I’d embellished it (I was told to), that she and her family had no involvement in the book, that it was done without them.  That’s a lie.  I spent a lot of time with the Snedekers in their home, I spent hours and hours talking to them.  They signed the contract, they read and approved the book, their names are on the cover, and they promoted the book extensively on television and radio when it was published.  While I was with the Snedekers, Carmen repeatedly asked about one thing, over and over:  “Do you think there’s a chance there will be a movie?  How much money do you think we’ll make?”

After the book was published, it was optioned, but that fell through, and then it just faded away.  Carmen now claims she went into hiding and tried to put it all behind her.  The fact is, she worked long and hard to keep that story alive, and her drum-beating finally paid off.  There was a re-enactment of the story done for the Discovery Channel series A Haunting – some call it a documentary, but only because they aren’t clear on the concept of “documentary.”  Then she got some movie interest.  All of this was done separate from the book In A Dark Place.  The story that Carmen told has, ahem, um … evolved over time.  When I was in Connecticut working on the book, John Zaffis, the Warrens’ nephew, was there.  He just sort of hung around.  It was made clear to me by Ed and Lorraine that Zaffis was just observing, that he was not officially involved in the investigation but was only learning the business and doing some kind of vague “research.”  Now, however, the story goes that John was the lead investigator and in charge of the whole thing.  And now, Zaffis and Carmen are writing a new book about this alleged demon infestation – an update that reflects all the changes the story has gone through over the years.

Shortly after the release of The Haunting in Connecticut, I heard from one of the movie’s producers.  He wanted me to participate in a “documentary” for the DVD – he called it a “reinvestigation” of the case.  He was very friendly and assured me he wasn’t out to “slam” anyone.  I agreed to the interview.  I figured it would be great exposure for my work.  At about that same time, I heard from the mother of the family currently living in the Connecticut house in which the Snedekers’ story took place, the former funeral home.  The family was not very happy.  Their house was being visited by total strangers – amateur “ghost hunters” who wanted to see the house in which Carmen Snedeker claimed to have been anally raped by invisible demons while washing dishes.  It seems their street address had been published on Lionsgate’s website and people were showing up to have a look.  She said the producer had approached her, too, and wanted to bring a film crew into their home for a tour.  Although she had assured him that nothing even remotely strange had ever happened in the house in all the years they’d been living there, the producer wanted to bring in a team of paranormal investigators to see if there was any lingering supernatural hibbidy-jibbidy in the house.  She showed me the email the producer had sent her.  In it, he referred to me quite a bit – and in a way that was very different from the tone of his email to me.  He was obviously quite contemptuous of what I had to say about my experience writing the book, and it became clear that he had a very firm opinion of me and an agenda that reflected it.  So I backed out of the interview.  I felt that whatever exposure it might have given me would’ve been marred by what was obviously going to be a negative slant.  The producer then offered me money to participate in the “documentary.”  I declined again because I knew that, in the end, whatever I said in front of the camera wouldn’t have mattered once the whole thing was edited in whatever way the producer wanted to edit it.  I haven’t seen the movie and have no interest in seeing it.  I was sick to death of this whole thing more than fifteen years ago, and it seems that the quality of the people involved has not changed in all that time.

One thing bothers me, though.  Over the years, supporters of Ed and Lorraine and true believers in the paranormal have slammed me pretty hard for telling my side of the In A Dark Place story.  A lot of them have accused me of telling this story to “cash in” on the Snedekers’ experience.  That’s always baffled me.  Cash in?  On what?  No one has ever paid me a dime to tell my story.  Where would this money come from?  Who would provide it?  I was paid to write that book, but I haven’t made a penny from it since.  I’ve told my story repeatedly because I didn’t want anyone to lump me together with the Snedekers and the Warrens, who concocted that lie.  Then The Haunting in Connecticut was released, and suddenly my story started getting a lot more attention.  For years, people accused me of telling my story to “cash in” on some mysterious source of money, but suddenly, with the release of the movie, they began to accuse me of being bitter and disgruntled because I wasn’t making any money off the movie!  First, I’m making money from it, then all of a sudden I’m not making money, and either way, I’m lying.  It’s absurd!  The story I’ve been telling for more than fifteen years has never changed.  I’ve never been paid to tell it, I’ve never made a dime from it, and as far as I’m concerned, I’ve never been deprived of any money because of it.  I did my job in 1992 and have long since moved on.  I have no motive for lying.  Meanwhile, the Snedekers’ story has gone through various, uh ... shall we say adjustments over the years, it’s gotten them a lot of attention in the media – particularly Carmen, who’s made many appearances on TV and radio – they’ve made money from a book, a TV show, a movie, and now another upcoming book.  But to the true believers, I’m the one who’s lying, I’m the one who’s lining my pockets or who’s bitter because I’m not lining my pockets.  Somewhere, H.L. Mencken and P.T. Barnum are laughing so hard, they’re puking.

HW: In 2006 you finally re-entered mass market publishing with THE LOVELIEST DEAD. Was it a relief to get back into major circulation?

RG:  Yes, it was.  It had been almost a decade since the publication of Shackled, and it felt great to see my books on bookstore shelves again.

HW: Will any of those limited edition books you published while out of the mass market scene get republished at a poor-man’s price now?

RG:  That was my hope when I signed on with Leisure.  So far, though, most of those books have not been released in paperback.  My backlist is going to become available through E-Reads soon, though, and I’m very happy about that.

HW: A year or so back you released RAVENOUS. Now you have another novel about our furry friends, BEASTIAL. Tell me what prompted you to write about werewolves? Is BEASTIAL a direct sequel to RAVENOUS?

RG: Yes, Bestial is a direct sequel to Ravenous.  I’ve always been a fan of the werewolf.  As a kid, The Wolf Man was one of my favorite movies, and I still think it’s been sadly overlooked.  It’s an incredibly tight, well-written, beautifully made movie.  I’ve always been intrigued by the werewolf myth, the idea of the beast in us being unleashed and given carte blanche to do as it pleases.

Ravenous was a fairly traditional werewolf tale, with one exception – the werewolf curse is not spread through bites, it’s a sexually transmitted disease.  With Bestial, I tried to do something a little different.  I injected religion.  That often goes hand in hand with vampires, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it involved in a werewolf story.  There’s a character in Bestial named Bob Berens whose life has been smothered by religion.  Having been raised in the Seventh-day Adventist cult, it’s the religion I know best, so I used it.  Bob has been emotionally crippled by his parents’ devotion to their religion, and it has consumed his life.  He’s paralyzed by fear and guilt and shame.  It’s common in werewolf stories to be shown the transformation of a human being into a werewolf, but in Bestial, I added the beginning of another transformation.  In the course of the story, we begin to see Bob gradually coming out of this smothering life to transform into an independent human being.

By the way, Bob is based on a real person whose personal situation is very, very similar to Bob’s.  He has been emotionally crippled by the Seventh-day Adventist cult, and by his fanatical family.  I’ve known him since the first grade, we were educated in Adventist schools together.  He’s my age.  And he’s not the only person I know in that situation.  There are a lot of people who’ve been damaged in the same way by Adventism.  It’s a religion that keeps to itself.  There are a number of Adventist communities throughout the country – they have their own schools, their own stores, their own doctors.  They keep to themselves, and that is strongly encouraged by the cult.  Within those communities, there are a lot of people like Bob.  A lot.

Bestial also features Karen Moffett and Gavin Keoph, two private investigators from Night Life, which was the sequel to Live Girls.  It links the four books together into a loosely-related series.
 
HW: At about the same time RAVENOUS hit stores I interviewed Leisure’s Don D’Auria and he said werewolves would be the next zombies. Do you think werewolves will become as popular as zombies have been for the past decade? Why?

RG:  Good god, I hope not!  I think the zombie genre was drained dry about the time the closing credits of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead first rolled.  Talk about beating an undead horse!  It’s not much different than what’s happened to vampires.  I’m old enough to remember when vampires were frightening undead bloodsuckers.  Now they’re sparkling in books and movies for the kids.  It’s enough to make me want to put a bullet in my brain.  I think it’s great that the long-neglected werewolf is getting some attention, but I honestly hope it isn’t driven into the ground and turned into flavorless pablum the way other subgenres have been.  By the way, Steve, it looks like the rest of the genre is finally catching up to you – you’ve been writing about werewolves for a long time.

HW: As an author who has written excellent books about both werewolves and vampires, I have to ask which you prefer and why.

RG:  I don’t really have a preference.  I enjoy both because they’re great metaphors for the parts of ourselves that we’re supposed to keep hidden – our sexuality, our passions, our extreme emotions.  For me, those are the things that make humanity interesting.  For so long, we’ve been told – mostly by religion, the worst thing humankind ever did to itself – that they’re bad things, that they must be buried deep and kept out of sight and that we should feel great shame and guilt because of them.  As a result, we’ve been fractured, broken.  We’ve been unable to integrate the various aspects of ourselves in a healthy, balanced way.  One of the reasons I’ve always loved the horror genre so much is that it addresses those things pretty directly and unapologetically.

HW: Why do you think we, as a society, have made the vampire a sex symbol?

RG:  I think Bram Stoker made the vampire a sex symbol.  The erotic subtext of Dracula was not lost on its Victorian audience.  They may have kept their ankles hidden, but they weren’t brain dead.  The vampire has always been a symbol of our lusts.  We have done some pretty strange things with it, though.  The vampire is no longer a menacing figure.  Now it’s the guy next door with great abs who looks like Fabio with fangs.  Now vampires are just plain folks.  The genres of “urban fantasy” or “paranormal romance” have taken an icon of horror and turned it into the star of modern-day masturbatory bodice-rippers, or they’ve made the vampire just another character.  I remember when the existence of a vampire in a story was a startling, frightening thing.  Now you’ve got books in which some of the characters are vampires, some are werewolves, some are trolls or elves – the vampire has been taken out of the realm of horror and turned into a mundane fantasy figure.  Personally, that’s not my thing.  I can’t read it or watch it.

HW: To take that a little further, why do you think supernatural elements have suddenly become so popular in romance fiction? I ask because, let’s face it, LIVE GIRLS was pretty damn erotic for its time and I suspect a lot of authors writing about love between humans and monsters have been influenced by your book.

RG:  The idea that I’ve influenced anyone is very flattering, although I don’t know if it’s true.  I don’t understand the use of horror icons in romance fiction.  It makes me scratch my head.  I remember when people used to complain that all the monsters in the classic Universal horror films ended up in Abbott and Costello movies.  Actually, I think that’s a pretty natural progression because horror and comedy are two sides of the same coin.  Both rely heavily on the suffering of others and on the element of surprise, even shock.  But horror and romance?  Go figure.

HW: You’re always posting odd and funny little bits on Facebook. How much time do you spend online, and do you find the Internet to be a distraction or a boon to your writing?

RG:  I don’t spend nearly as much time online as I used to.  I had a long, painful illness that made being creative rather difficult and I spent way too much time online, on message boards and in chat rooms.  Now my health is great, and I’ve been able to turn my focus back to writing.  I’m finally going to have a website soon, and I have a Facebook page and a MySpace page and I dabble on Twitter a little, but I don’t spend that much time on them.  I do it mostly to promote my work, but I’m not very good at self-promotion and never have been.  I’m just not wired that way.  I do my best, but that’s not much, I’m afraid.  I write.  That’s what I do, it’s what I’m good at and what I’m comfortable doing.  A lot of writers are great at self-promotion, and I envy them.  It seems to come naturally to them.  It doesn’t for me.  Some of the writers who are great at it have to be because that’s all they’ve got going for them.  The Internet can be a distraction, but lately, it hasn’t been for me because I’ve just been too busy.  If anything, my work has been a distraction and has pulled me away from the rest of my life more than I’d like.

HW: Tell us who influenced you as a young writer.

RG:  So many writers.  Edgar Allen Poe was the first.  Richard Matheson.  Robert Bloch.  Rod Serling.  Ira Levin. When Stephen King and Peter Straub came along, I began to see that horror wasn’t just for kids.  I realized that it had a seat at the literary table.  I was influenced by a lot of writers outside the genre – William Goldman, Charles Dickens, Sidney Sheldon (yes, that’s right, Sidney Sheldon), Mark Twain, Elmore Leonard, John D. McDonald, John Irving, Neil Simon, Michael Crichton, Woody Allen, a number of science fiction writers, mystery writers.  These are just names I’m pulling off the top of my head.  I think it’s impossible to dissect one’s influence because it’s really a vast web.  There may be a few writers who stand out, but anything can be influential to a young writer.  I’m still being influenced by writers, and I’m sure that will always be the case.

HW: Who do you read these days?

RG:  Surprisingly little horror.  The last thing I read in the genre was Duma Key, and that was the first horror I’d read in quite a while.  I read a wider variety of stuff now than I ever have before.  I’ve been reading a lot of classics – Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Wilde, and others – as well as a variety of non-fiction by people like Oliver Sacks, Jessica Mitford, Richard Dawkins, and Gore Vidal.  Lately, I’ve read Harlan Coben and T.C. Boyle and Mark Frost and Lewis Black and Herman Raucher and Cornell Woolrich and Barry Gifford.  And I’m chomping at the bit to read the new John Irving.

HW: OK, it’s pimpin’ time. Tell us what you have out most recently and what it’s about.

RG:  Bestial is out and Ravenous is still in print.  Last year, Lonely Roads books published a book containing two short crime novels that I wrote under the name Arthur Darknell, Loveless and Murder Was My Alibi.  That book is known as the Arthur Darknell Double, and it’s a one of the most gorgeous books I’ve ever seen, beautifully put together.

HW: What’s coming next?

RG:  Leisure Books will be publishing my novel Scissors in February of 2010.  At the moment, I’m finishing up a mainstream novel that will be published pseudonymously, and then I’ll be writing a sequel to The New Neighbor for Infernal House.  At some point, I’ll be following Bestial with a novel in which Karen Moffett and Gavin Keoph find themselves in the middle of a bloody battle between the vampires of Live Girls and Night Life and the werewolves of Ravenous and Bestial.  And I’ve got a couple of other novels in the works that are about as far away from the horror genre as you can get, but they won’t see the light of day for awhile.

HW: What should I have asked but forgot to ask because, you know, I’m getting old?

RG: I can’t think of anything.  I think you covered everything important.  And don’t get me started on getting old.

HW: Ray, once again, thank you for your time. We really appreciate you here at Horror World and I think I speak for a huge fan base when I say we look forward to your next great novel.

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